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Description

Currently, it is difficult to tell that the compiler is using boxed math unless you look at the generated bytecode. The proposed enhancement here is to emit new warnings if *unchecked-math* is on and boxed math is occurring.

Approach: In the compiler, when compiling a StaticMethodExpr, if *unchecked-math* is true and the class is clojure.lang.Numbers and one of the parameters of static method is of type java.lang.Object or java.lang.Number, then emit a warning at compile-time.

In addition, there is a new WarnBoxedMath Java annotation - a small number of methods on Numbers with Object parameters use this annotation to indicate that warning should not take place. The same annotation can be (but is not currently) used to mark methods on Numbers without Object/Number params that should warn. See boxedmath.txt for a list of methods and categories.

1) There is no way to get both overflow checks and boxed-math warnings at the same time. Maybe this doesn't matter.

2) The error messages aren't ideal, because they refer to clojure.lang.Numbers, but we can assume that anyone savvy enough to be using *unboxed-math* will also be savvy enough to know what clojure.lang.Numbers is.

3) This doesn't protect me from autoboxing in arbitrary Java method calls, but normal reflection warnings should catch most real-world cases, since few Java APIs overload on primitive and Object.

Stuart Sierra
added a comment - 16/May/14 1:15 PM Screened. Comments:
1) There is no way to get both overflow checks and boxed-math warnings at the same time. Maybe this doesn't matter.
2) The error messages aren't ideal, because they refer to clojure.lang.Numbers, but we can assume that anyone savvy enough to be using *unboxed-math* will also be savvy enough to know what clojure.lang.Numbers is.
3) This doesn't protect me from autoboxing in arbitrary Java method calls, but normal reflection warnings should catch most real-world cases, since few Java APIs overload on primitive and Object.

I assume your question is why the call to Numbers.num(long) at the end doesn't cause the warning due to the return type? I had those num() calls in my early list of questionables. This function is tricky because it's called from lots of other methods (many of which already trigger the warning), so it has the potential to cause multiple warnings on a single expression. But this does indeed seem like a common and important case to suggest a return type hint.

Any of these calls that take prims but return a Number or Object require a judgement call and an explicit annotation - there is certainly room for interpretation on some of them.

I assume your question is why the call to Numbers.num(long) at the end doesn't cause the warning due to the return type? I had those num() calls in my early list of questionables. This function is tricky because it's called from lots of other methods (many of which already trigger the warning), so it has the potential to cause multiple warnings on a single expression. But this does indeed seem like a common and important case to suggest a return type hint.
Any of these calls that take prims but return a Number or Object require a judgement call and an explicit annotation - there is certainly room for interpretation on some of them.
Adding the return type hint cleans things up pretty well: